Jersey’s Ice Age coastline provides an accessible, dramatic and informative landscape for understanding how two million years of climate change shaped the North West Europe in which we live today. There is perhaps no landscape in the region which combines such a concentration of archaeological sites, natural features and vistas which tell our planet’s Ice Age story so clearly.

Capturing La Cotte

In 2014, as part of the on-going management of La Cotte, a laser scan of the headland and ravine system at La Cotte was undertaken by a team of geomatic surveyors from UCL. The survey, funded by Jersey Heritage, managed by Archaeology South East and implemented by Hannah Corcoran, Anita Soni and Charles Thompson from the UCL department of Civil Engineering and geomatic was a mammoth undertaking and produced a highly detailed dataset.

Here’s the numbers:
From just 5 Survey Control Points
And 40 Laser Scanner Setups
Over 6.2 Gigabytes of raw scan data were captured
Giving over 1.0 billion scan points captured

You can see the data here

And here’s how we process it.

The data will be invaluable in manageing the site through the 21st century.